Chief Judge Sean Cox helped host a visit to the federal courthouse in March by Ireland Attorney General Rossa Fanning (fourth from right) who posed for a photo op with Chief Judge Cox and other distinguished members of the federal bench and State Bar.
By Tom Kirvan
Legal News
When Sean Cox became chief judge of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in 2022, the opulence and grandeur of the Million-Dollar Courtroom in Detroit awaited him at what was expected to be his new judicial home.
For decades, the magnificent courtroom – featuring some 30 types of marble and containing elaborate woodwork throughout – has been the crown jewel of the Theodore Levin Courthouse in downtown Detroit, traditionally serving as the place where the chief judge of the Eastern District presides.
But Judge Cox, who takes pride in being a student of history and an ardent believer in the value of tradition, decided he would remain in his current courtroom on the eighth floor of the federal building on West Lafayette, breaking with a time-honored principle for the sake of good old-fashioned Irish loyalty.
His courtroom was formerly occupied by his chief legal mentor, the late U.S. District Judge Patrick Duggan, who retired in 2015 after a distinguished 28-year career on the federal bench. A portrait of Judge Duggan, in fact, is displayed prominently in the courtroom along with two other federal jurists sporting Irish backgrounds, thereby offering a judicial slice of the Emerald Isle.
“This courtroom has been special to me, given the ties I had with Judge Duggan and how much I admired him,” Cox said while giving a tour. “This is a place filled with memories of a man who was a true legal legend.”
On a personal level, the Duggan-Cox ties run deep, said the Chief Judge.
“Pat’s dad immigrated from Ireland and, of course, my parents did as well,” said Cox, a Detroit Catholic Central classmate of Duggan’s son, Mike, the 75th mayor of Detroit. “Both of our families have cousins in Ireland and both have cousins who were priests in Ireland. In addition, we both had five children and our wives were nurses.
“Our legal paths were also strikingly similar in that both of us practiced law in Wayne County and served as president of the Livonia Bar Association before we each became a judge on the Wayne County Circuit Court and then the U.S. District Court,” Cox added.
For Cox, his time on the federal bench came to an end on July 28 when he retired, passing the ceremonial gavel to Judge Stephen Murphy, a former U.S. Attorney appointed to the court in 2008 who also bears an Irish surname.
Cox’s retirement will be in name only and decidedly short, as he plans this summer to join the Detroit office of JAMS, short for Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services.
“I prefer to say that I’m just changing my legal direction,” Cox said of his impending departure from the federal court. “Without getting too sentimental, it’s been a great honor to serve the court and to be its chief judge for the past 3-1/2 years, where I’ve overseen the operation of five courthouses, 320 employees, and 21 judges. Fortunately, I’ve been surrounded by enormously talented and dedicated people who have worked hard to ensure that justice is done.”
When he joins JAMS, Cox will be working with a number of former federal colleagues, including retired judges Gerald Rosen, Phillip Shefferly, and Victoria Roberts, who was instrumental in encouraging him to become part of the blue-ribbon team of neutrals in the Detroit office.
Rosen, who served on the federal court in Detroit for nearly 27 years, including seven years as its chief judge, has been a longtime admirer of Cox, particularly for the important mediation role he played during the Detroit bankruptcy.
In 2013, Rosen was chosen as the chief mediator of the Detroit bankruptcy case, which by all accounts was the largest and most complex municipal bankruptcy in American history. As chief mediator, Rosen was tasked with assembling a seasoned team of other mediators to wade through the many sub-chapters of a case that dominated local headlines for months. Among the particularly difficult assignments facing Rosen was to select a mediator with the smarts and savvy to handle a swarm of issues surrounding the past, present, and future of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD), which served more than 4.5 million people in southeast Michigan.
“The more I thought about it, the more one name kept coming back to me,” Rosen wrote in his 2024 book titled, “Grand Bargain: The Inside Story of Detroit’s Dramatic Journey from Bankruptcy to Rebirth.”
“My colleague Judge Sean Cox had inherited the EPA/DWSD case,” said Rosen of the long-running water-pollution lawsuit brought by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency back in 1977. “By this time, Sean knew the problems and personalities better than anyone . . . Beyond this, Sean had unique talents that I thought would be absolutely necessary to a successful result for this daunting assignment. Not only was he among the hardest-working judges on our court and tenacious as a bulldog once he sank his teeth into an assignment, but he also had finely tuned political instincts and knew some of the key players well from his days in state politics – including Mayor Mike Duggan. I thought if any of us could break through the stalemate with this crowd, it would be Sean.”
And it was, much to Rosen’s relief.
“To his everlasting credit – and the region’s good fortune – he accepted my invitation to join our mediation team,” Rosen wrote of Judge Cox. “Once set upon the course, he tackled this multifaceted colossus with single-minded determination, patience and tenacity.”
Cox’s deft mediation work, according to Rosen, set the stage for the creation of a new regional water system – the Great Lakes Water Authority, an entity that satisfied Wall Street creditors and ensured that sizeable investments would be made to upgrade the system’s aging infrastructure.
For Cox, his role in helping resolve the nettlesome mediation task was “deeply satisfying” and was a testament to the willingness of the various parties to compromise for the public good.
Cox’s legal skills and commitment to the rule of law have been put to the test repeatedly during his time on the federal court, according to U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds.
“Judge Cox became chief judge at a difficult time, taking the reins when the court was moving out of the COVID mode of remote work back to live in-court proceedings – a transition which was often rocky and controversial,” noted Edmunds, a summa cum laude graduate of Wayne State University Law School who has been a member of the federal bench since 1992. “At the same time, six new judges were appointed to our bench, all with different backgrounds and different new ideas. He handled the challenges with firmness and grace, always sensitive to the need to keep the court’s interests and responsibilities at the forefront of his decision-making.”
Edmunds, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and master of arts from the University of Chicago, also praised Cox’s handling of various other challenging and sometimes thorny assignments.
“Some of the most notable and complex work taken on by Judge Cox was the staffing and coordination of cases in the Middle District of Tennessee, which had fallen behind on its docket and asked for assistance from our court,” Edmunds indicated. “He also took over and resolved the mega-case involving the Detroit Water Department, which had been pending in our court for over a decade. And he worked for many years in organizations and on panels which handle questions of legal ethics and discipline.”
Edmunds said she will “miss his sense of humor, his advice, and his company” as a judicial colleague.
“Sean Cox has been a wonderful friend, and I consider myself fortunate that we have been able to be sounding boards for each other over the years – running the gamut from personal matters to complex legal issues,” Edmunds said.
Her comments were echoed by U.S. District Judge Terrence Berg, a magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University who also earned his juris doctor degree from the law school in Washington, D.C.
“Judge Cox was a real work-horse of a leader for our court,” said Berg, who was appointed to the federal bench in 2012 by President Barack Obama. “When another federal district court in Tennessee had a severe shortage of judges, Judge Cox almost single-handedly took on their criminal docket, and resolved scores of cases for them. He set an example for all of us.
“Behind his stoic Irish exterior was the heart of a person who really cared about the operation and the mission of the court, from the criminal defendants, to the parties in civil cases, the lawyers on both sides, the judges and all the court personnel,” related Berg, who served as an interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District from August 2008 to January 2010. “He spent a ton of effort looking at issues from all sides to reach a decision that he thought was in the best interest of the court.
Berg said his longtime colleague also should be credited for safeguarding the rights of criminal defendants during his time on the court.
“He was particularly sensitive to the needs of criminal defense attorneys to be able to communicate effectively with their clients, and worked very hard to arrange for detention facilities nearer to our courthouse so that detained defendants could see their lawyers more often and without needing to travel long distances to visit their clients,” Berg declared.
The 67-year-old Cox was the first in his family to graduate from college and then to obtain a graduate degree. An alum of the University of Michigan, where he studied political science and history, Cox worked his way through college with plans to pursue a possible career in the automotive or construction industries before a downturn in the economy made job opportunities scarce in both sectors.
“Friends of my father suggested I might consider enrolling in law school after I got laid off in December 1979 from my job in construction,” Cox said. “So, I did, starting at the old Detroit College of Law in the winter of 1980.”
A clerkship with a Detroit law firm soon proved beneficial, giving him exposure to the field of litigation, which he found “interesting” and instilled him with a sense of confidence that “I can do this.”
Upon graduating in December 1983, Cox landed a job with the Kitch law firm in Detroit, accepting an offer from the firm’s co-founder, Richard Suhrheinrich, now a long-serving judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
“He hired my brother, Kevin, a year later,” noted Cox, who spent five years with the firm before accepting a job with Cummings McClorey in Livonia.
During his time there, Cox served as president of the Livonia Bar Association and became active in Republican politics, assisting with John Engler’s successful gubernatorial campaign in 1990. His work with the Engler campaign put Cox on the governor’s radar when an opening on the Wayne County Circuit Court occurred in the spring of 1996.
“When I was appointed in March of that year, I also faced the task of running for election that fall to hold onto that seat,” Cox said. “It was my first time running for elective office, but I found it to be a very interesting experience as I enjoyed seeing and learning about certain areas in the county that I was not familiar with – such as the Downriver area.”
Serving as his campaign manager was his youngest brother, Mike, who six years later would narrowly defeat Democrat Gary Peters to become the first Republican attorney general in Michigan since 1955.
Cox spent 10 years on the Wayne Circuit Court, presiding over hundreds of criminal cases, including the trial of a serial rapist accused of assaulting a number of Detroit school girls on the city’s west side and a 2003 triple-homicide in which a father killed three of his children and wounded another.
Those cases, and the grizzly details they contained, were particularly difficult for Cox to digest.
“As the father of five children, I found it almost impossible to absorb what I saw and heard during those cases,” Cox admitted.
In contrast, Cox and his two brothers – all proud alums of Detroit Catholic Central – grew up in a loving and faith-filled home headed by their parents, Rita and John, both of whom were Irish immigrants.
“As immigrants, their life journeys were long and hard, but they knew the value of hard work and made sure that all of us understood the importance of developing a strong work ethic,” Cox said.
It is a message Cox and his wife, Janine, a registered nurse, have imparted on their five children – John, Caitlin, Brendan, Clare, and Patrick.
“We’re proud of each one of them and who they have become,” Cox said of his children, who have blessed him and his wife with two grandchildren.
“Hopefully now, in this new life of ours, we will have more time to spend with them in our free time and travels.”
By Tom Kirvan
Legal News
When Sean Cox became chief judge of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in 2022, the opulence and grandeur of the Million-Dollar Courtroom in Detroit awaited him at what was expected to be his new judicial home.
For decades, the magnificent courtroom – featuring some 30 types of marble and containing elaborate woodwork throughout – has been the crown jewel of the Theodore Levin Courthouse in downtown Detroit, traditionally serving as the place where the chief judge of the Eastern District presides.
But Judge Cox, who takes pride in being a student of history and an ardent believer in the value of tradition, decided he would remain in his current courtroom on the eighth floor of the federal building on West Lafayette, breaking with a time-honored principle for the sake of good old-fashioned Irish loyalty.
His courtroom was formerly occupied by his chief legal mentor, the late U.S. District Judge Patrick Duggan, who retired in 2015 after a distinguished 28-year career on the federal bench. A portrait of Judge Duggan, in fact, is displayed prominently in the courtroom along with two other federal jurists sporting Irish backgrounds, thereby offering a judicial slice of the Emerald Isle.
“This courtroom has been special to me, given the ties I had with Judge Duggan and how much I admired him,” Cox said while giving a tour. “This is a place filled with memories of a man who was a true legal legend.”
On a personal level, the Duggan-Cox ties run deep, said the Chief Judge.
“Pat’s dad immigrated from Ireland and, of course, my parents did as well,” said Cox, a Detroit Catholic Central classmate of Duggan’s son, Mike, the 75th mayor of Detroit. “Both of our families have cousins in Ireland and both have cousins who were priests in Ireland. In addition, we both had five children and our wives were nurses.
“Our legal paths were also strikingly similar in that both of us practiced law in Wayne County and served as president of the Livonia Bar Association before we each became a judge on the Wayne County Circuit Court and then the U.S. District Court,” Cox added.
For Cox, his time on the federal bench came to an end on July 28 when he retired, passing the ceremonial gavel to Judge Stephen Murphy, a former U.S. Attorney appointed to the court in 2008 who also bears an Irish surname.
Cox’s retirement will be in name only and decidedly short, as he plans this summer to join the Detroit office of JAMS, short for Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services.
“I prefer to say that I’m just changing my legal direction,” Cox said of his impending departure from the federal court. “Without getting too sentimental, it’s been a great honor to serve the court and to be its chief judge for the past 3-1/2 years, where I’ve overseen the operation of five courthouses, 320 employees, and 21 judges. Fortunately, I’ve been surrounded by enormously talented and dedicated people who have worked hard to ensure that justice is done.”
When he joins JAMS, Cox will be working with a number of former federal colleagues, including retired judges Gerald Rosen, Phillip Shefferly, and Victoria Roberts, who was instrumental in encouraging him to become part of the blue-ribbon team of neutrals in the Detroit office.
Rosen, who served on the federal court in Detroit for nearly 27 years, including seven years as its chief judge, has been a longtime admirer of Cox, particularly for the important mediation role he played during the Detroit bankruptcy.
In 2013, Rosen was chosen as the chief mediator of the Detroit bankruptcy case, which by all accounts was the largest and most complex municipal bankruptcy in American history. As chief mediator, Rosen was tasked with assembling a seasoned team of other mediators to wade through the many sub-chapters of a case that dominated local headlines for months. Among the particularly difficult assignments facing Rosen was to select a mediator with the smarts and savvy to handle a swarm of issues surrounding the past, present, and future of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD), which served more than 4.5 million people in southeast Michigan.
“The more I thought about it, the more one name kept coming back to me,” Rosen wrote in his 2024 book titled, “Grand Bargain: The Inside Story of Detroit’s Dramatic Journey from Bankruptcy to Rebirth.”
“My colleague Judge Sean Cox had inherited the EPA/DWSD case,” said Rosen of the long-running water-pollution lawsuit brought by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency back in 1977. “By this time, Sean knew the problems and personalities better than anyone . . . Beyond this, Sean had unique talents that I thought would be absolutely necessary to a successful result for this daunting assignment. Not only was he among the hardest-working judges on our court and tenacious as a bulldog once he sank his teeth into an assignment, but he also had finely tuned political instincts and knew some of the key players well from his days in state politics – including Mayor Mike Duggan. I thought if any of us could break through the stalemate with this crowd, it would be Sean.”
And it was, much to Rosen’s relief.
“To his everlasting credit – and the region’s good fortune – he accepted my invitation to join our mediation team,” Rosen wrote of Judge Cox. “Once set upon the course, he tackled this multifaceted colossus with single-minded determination, patience and tenacity.”
Cox’s deft mediation work, according to Rosen, set the stage for the creation of a new regional water system – the Great Lakes Water Authority, an entity that satisfied Wall Street creditors and ensured that sizeable investments would be made to upgrade the system’s aging infrastructure.
For Cox, his role in helping resolve the nettlesome mediation task was “deeply satisfying” and was a testament to the willingness of the various parties to compromise for the public good.
Cox’s legal skills and commitment to the rule of law have been put to the test repeatedly during his time on the federal court, according to U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds.
“Judge Cox became chief judge at a difficult time, taking the reins when the court was moving out of the COVID mode of remote work back to live in-court proceedings – a transition which was often rocky and controversial,” noted Edmunds, a summa cum laude graduate of Wayne State University Law School who has been a member of the federal bench since 1992. “At the same time, six new judges were appointed to our bench, all with different backgrounds and different new ideas. He handled the challenges with firmness and grace, always sensitive to the need to keep the court’s interests and responsibilities at the forefront of his decision-making.”
Edmunds, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and master of arts from the University of Chicago, also praised Cox’s handling of various other challenging and sometimes thorny assignments.
“Some of the most notable and complex work taken on by Judge Cox was the staffing and coordination of cases in the Middle District of Tennessee, which had fallen behind on its docket and asked for assistance from our court,” Edmunds indicated. “He also took over and resolved the mega-case involving the Detroit Water Department, which had been pending in our court for over a decade. And he worked for many years in organizations and on panels which handle questions of legal ethics and discipline.”
Edmunds said she will “miss his sense of humor, his advice, and his company” as a judicial colleague.
“Sean Cox has been a wonderful friend, and I consider myself fortunate that we have been able to be sounding boards for each other over the years – running the gamut from personal matters to complex legal issues,” Edmunds said.
Her comments were echoed by U.S. District Judge Terrence Berg, a magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University who also earned his juris doctor degree from the law school in Washington, D.C.
“Judge Cox was a real work-horse of a leader for our court,” said Berg, who was appointed to the federal bench in 2012 by President Barack Obama. “When another federal district court in Tennessee had a severe shortage of judges, Judge Cox almost single-handedly took on their criminal docket, and resolved scores of cases for them. He set an example for all of us.
“Behind his stoic Irish exterior was the heart of a person who really cared about the operation and the mission of the court, from the criminal defendants, to the parties in civil cases, the lawyers on both sides, the judges and all the court personnel,” related Berg, who served as an interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District from August 2008 to January 2010. “He spent a ton of effort looking at issues from all sides to reach a decision that he thought was in the best interest of the court.
Berg said his longtime colleague also should be credited for safeguarding the rights of criminal defendants during his time on the court.
“He was particularly sensitive to the needs of criminal defense attorneys to be able to communicate effectively with their clients, and worked very hard to arrange for detention facilities nearer to our courthouse so that detained defendants could see their lawyers more often and without needing to travel long distances to visit their clients,” Berg declared.
The 67-year-old Cox was the first in his family to graduate from college and then to obtain a graduate degree. An alum of the University of Michigan, where he studied political science and history, Cox worked his way through college with plans to pursue a possible career in the automotive or construction industries before a downturn in the economy made job opportunities scarce in both sectors.
“Friends of my father suggested I might consider enrolling in law school after I got laid off in December 1979 from my job in construction,” Cox said. “So, I did, starting at the old Detroit College of Law in the winter of 1980.”
A clerkship with a Detroit law firm soon proved beneficial, giving him exposure to the field of litigation, which he found “interesting” and instilled him with a sense of confidence that “I can do this.”
Upon graduating in December 1983, Cox landed a job with the Kitch law firm in Detroit, accepting an offer from the firm’s co-founder, Richard Suhrheinrich, now a long-serving judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
“He hired my brother, Kevin, a year later,” noted Cox, who spent five years with the firm before accepting a job with Cummings McClorey in Livonia.
During his time there, Cox served as president of the Livonia Bar Association and became active in Republican politics, assisting with John Engler’s successful gubernatorial campaign in 1990. His work with the Engler campaign put Cox on the governor’s radar when an opening on the Wayne County Circuit Court occurred in the spring of 1996.
“When I was appointed in March of that year, I also faced the task of running for election that fall to hold onto that seat,” Cox said. “It was my first time running for elective office, but I found it to be a very interesting experience as I enjoyed seeing and learning about certain areas in the county that I was not familiar with – such as the Downriver area.”
Serving as his campaign manager was his youngest brother, Mike, who six years later would narrowly defeat Democrat Gary Peters to become the first Republican attorney general in Michigan since 1955.
Cox spent 10 years on the Wayne Circuit Court, presiding over hundreds of criminal cases, including the trial of a serial rapist accused of assaulting a number of Detroit school girls on the city’s west side and a 2003 triple-homicide in which a father killed three of his children and wounded another.
Those cases, and the grizzly details they contained, were particularly difficult for Cox to digest.
“As the father of five children, I found it almost impossible to absorb what I saw and heard during those cases,” Cox admitted.
In contrast, Cox and his two brothers – all proud alums of Detroit Catholic Central – grew up in a loving and faith-filled home headed by their parents, Rita and John, both of whom were Irish immigrants.
“As immigrants, their life journeys were long and hard, but they knew the value of hard work and made sure that all of us understood the importance of developing a strong work ethic,” Cox said.
It is a message Cox and his wife, Janine, a registered nurse, have imparted on their five children – John, Caitlin, Brendan, Clare, and Patrick.
“We’re proud of each one of them and who they have become,” Cox said of his children, who have blessed him and his wife with two grandchildren.
“Hopefully now, in this new life of ours, we will have more time to spend with them in our free time and travels.”
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